by Art Smith
artsmithite @msn.com
Member of
the
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n 1969 my family and I took a week of vacation and mineral collecting in the Arkansas Ouachita Mountains during October (Smith 1970). The trip was so successful that we repeated it in October 1970. Although it was also put into an article for Rocks & Minerals, it was never published. Recently while doing some research on Magnet Cove, a copy of the manuscript was found and with editing and updates is reproduced here.
The trip to
The next day we headed through Hot Springs and north on
State Route 7 with a quick stop at Coleman’s mineral shop before turning west
at Blue Springs. I was not impressed with the quartz selection or prices. As
the previous year, I was looking for a super-small cabinet group. Actually I
never did find one in all my trips until the crystal craze hit in the 1980s,
and there was a great increase in mining and specimens. Even in 1970, most of
the top quality specimens were being sent to Europe, particularly
We headed west for Dug Hill until we came to the Avant (Buckville) crossroads and
then turned south. After a couple of miles and at the crest of a hill, we found
a small borrow pit on the east side of the road. We turned around and drove
back to the base of the hill where a dim trail led east. Parking as far off the
road as possible, we took the trail for several hundred feet and then turned
south up the hill, with me pulling my three-and-a-half year old son who was using
both hands to hold onto the head of my geology pick. There were many small
diggings about ¾ths of the way up and along the north crest of the
hill which now appeared more like a ridge. The most recent digging activity was
in the largest cut. The wavellite and variscite occur
in fractures and rarely in cavities of a gray sandy-appearing phase of the Big
Fork Chert. The green to yellowish wavellite generally forms flat concentric
and radiating patterns up to 5 cm across in thin seams. In the cavities, the
spheres and hemispheres are up to 3 cm in diameter, and their outer surface is
composed of wavellite crystal terminations. Variscite
occurs as brighter and darker green coatings with drusy crystals coating some
rock, rarely directly associated with the wavellite. Before the late 1970s,
practically all the wavellite produced in
One corner of the largest cut had some recent digging, and I noticed it was on an irregular 7 cm thick milky quartz vein. The unusual thing was that in the quartz vein the wavellite occurred on variscite in small green hemispheres usually less than one centimeter across. To make digging even harder, the beds of the Big Fork Chert are vertical. I followed the vein down and back into the cut as best as I could and got a few nice specimens up to 5 by 8 cm. before I realized that further digging would be futile. A few years later, in 1979, while talking to mineral dealer Clyde Garmon in Pencil Bluff where he sold minerals from a shop in his house, I learned that he was the one who originally worked the quartz vein, and he still had two flats of the material under his bed though it had been somewhat high graded. We made a swap including them, and I upgraded my own collection and had some nice trading material.
As at
In the early afternoon, we continued further west and
stopped at Ocus Stanley’s before heading back to
For the rest of our stay, I concentrated my collecting at Magnet Cove in the area around the Cove Creek bridge and the highway that was then U.S. 270 and is now State Route 51. Here work had been in progress for widening the bridge, and some blasting and digging in the creek bed had uncovered some long-hidden rocks. So I grabbed my sledge and went to work on some of the larger boulders. I did not collect as much carbonatite as previously, so I did not get a large number of magnetite and perovskite crystals. I did get one nice 2 cm magnetite octahedron and some 1 cm skeletal octahedral pyrite crystals in carbonatite.
One small piece of carbonatite I acidized later at home, and I got some small groups of pseudohexagonal green biotite with what twenty-five years later turned out to be hercynite octohedrons. Instead this year there was quite a bit of vesuvianite rock in shades of green, yellow, and reddish brown. Crude crystal faces were observed, but no good crystals were collected. One small white mass composed of elongate natrolite crystals was collected and some natrolite in wollastonite. Several small red to pink masses of eudialyte were also liberated from the syenite, but none showed good crystal form. The only coarse syenite pegmatite minerals collected were some 5 by 6 centimeter greenish and white cleavages of microcline and some green to black partial elongate crystals of aegirine. Coatings of acicular aegirine in green felted masses were collected with the microcline. This type of material was thought to be epidote by some collectors, but epidote still has not been reported with in Magnet Cove. It has been identified in altered rocks in the Jones Mill quarry off the south flank.
However my rarest and best find can only be talked about.
In a small chunk of rock broken from a large boulder, were about 5 or 6 plates
up to one centimeter across slightly protruding from a fine-grained matrix.
They were an extremely bright yellow-brown, and without careful examination I
put in out of harm’s way on a boulder in the creek. Then I went to work on the
rest of the boulder which evidently contained nothing of interest—at least
nothing that I remember. On arriving home in
During this trip I made a stop to visit Joe Kimzey who lived along the highway east of the bridge on the north side of the road. I found him at home and well enough to entertain visitors. We had a nice visit, and I purchased some small black andradite garnets, some small brookite crystals, and some black quartz. However, the larger pegmatite specimens he had sitting on the lawn were beyond my means at $25 each. Now they would be worth many times that while the specimens I did purchase have been all bettered and so removed from my collection.
References:
Smith, A. E., Jr. 1970
Williams, J .F. 1891 Igneous Rocks of Aransas.
Annual Report of the Geological Survey of